How our teachers got it wrong
Like most people, I was an impressionable child. And like most people, I believed what my teachers told me.
We’ve all been there, although some of us have probably tried harder to bury the memories. But I’m sure we all remember fighting off sleep in over-heated classrooms, the heating on in summer, the sour milk at break, the windows painted with flowers.
I should have known the teachers were not to be trusted, the way they painted windows with such wild abandon. They said it was all right as long as you used poster paint.
And then they told me to avoid the word got. They said it was an ugly word.
“Listen to it!”
They kept repeating it, exaggerating the guttural sound of got.
Decades later and I know perfectly reasonable, sane people, who are still have issues with the word got. Some of them even work as writers and editors. They argue with me, but I argue back.
“How would the Dutch cope,” I ask them, “if they were taught that guttural words sounded ugly?”
But people don’t listen. They carry on retaining, obtaining, gaining, purveying, earning, garnering, receiving, even mining and harvesting, but never really getting the point.
These people – wonderful people who I respect in so many ways – seem to have been tainted, even ruined by their attentiveness at primary school.
And now some of them work in education. Completing the circle, they tell our children that the word got is ugly. They will go to any length to avoid it, even when trying to aide the involvement of parents in the wellbeing of their children. (They are still too damaged to simply get parents involved.)
I don’t know why I’m different. May be I was just one of the lucky ones – I sat by the radiator and couldn’t stay awake.
And I have my mother to thank even if the lesson was hard to learn. Painting on the sitting room windows may have got me into big trouble, but it taught me to question those teachers.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Absolutely spot on article. I live in the adminisphere surrounded by pseudo-psycho management babble. Lets have your musings on “going forward” in future (!)
November 8th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Don’t blame the teachers – they’re only trying to expand our collective young and inexperienced vocabulary. And its only by learning these interesting and vague alternatives that we can begin to explore the wonders of our language and tell our great and nuanced stories. I know some interesting people who are masters at ‘obtaining’ valuable information. So don’t blame the teachers – they open our young eyes to a world of wonder and amazement.
If you want to deal out blame, look no further than the thesaurus – the tool of the modern literary scoundrel.
Most of us forget the wonderful alternatives we learn at school – except those gifted and bloody-minded types that go on to be writers and poets – in the same way that we forget algebra, geometry and bionomial expansions. But we’re charlatans. We want to impress with our language skills so we keep a thesaurus to hand in the same way an alcoholic will keep some hooch to hand for a quick nip. I know many language evangelists who often refer to the office tome for inspiration. Bad evangelist – no tea and cake for you.
If you want to change how we use language, gather up and burn every thesaurus. Kinda fascist I know, but you have to be a little radical to change the world. Crikey, there’s that ‘C’ word again – been hearing that a lot lately. Let me get my thesaurus and find an alternative…